January 29, 2006

You Say You Want a Revolution, Oh Yeah

THE next time you're stuck in traffic in downtown Los Angeles, you
could find yourself in the perfect position to view Ruben Ochoa's
newest work of art. A San Diego native who made his name locally by
turning his family's beat-up van into a mobile art gallery, Mr. Ochoa
has just completed a billboard celebrating the legacy of the Mexican
muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros. It features a photograph of Siqueiros,
who was a Communist Party leader as well as a painter, making a fist,
his face streaked with paint, as two characters in the corner whitewash
his image - a clear allusion to the censorship of Siqueiros's social
realist murals in the past. Across the top runs the phrase "Ain't that
revolutionary?"

Mr. Ochoa's billboard is one of many overtly political pieces
created for "An Image Bank for Everyday Revolutionary Life," a group
show that opens at the Redcat gallery in Los Angeles on Thursday. For
the exhibition, 17 artists were asked to respond to Siqueiros's
photographic archive, some 11,000 pictures that served as source
material for his murals or as documentation of his finished artwork.

[orig. Siqueiros mural]

Most
of the artists lifted images from the archive to make pieces like
photomontages for installation in the gallery. Three artists based in
Los Angeles - Mr. Ochoa, Mark Bradford and Daniel Martinez - also
signed on to make billboards. They are scheduled to be installed
downtown by the end of the week.

Lauri Firstenberg, one of the
show's two curators, says she views the billboards as an essential part
of the show. "Siqueiros was above all a populist artist - making art
for the public and positioning it in the public sphere," she said. "We
always wanted to have a component of the exhibition that was not bound
to the gallery but would interact with L.A.'s urban landscape."

Born in 1896, Siqueiros at one point interacted with the Los Angeles
landscape himself. Driven into exile for political reasons in 1932, he
took a job teaching at the Chouinard School of Art and painted "Street
Meeting," the first of three California murals, on the campus. During
that period he experimented with new materials (automobile paints, for
example, a more durable alternative to traditional fresco materials)
and new equipment (like spray guns, a faster way of applying paint than
brushwork). He also seized on photography as a tool for painting, using
photographs of a work in progress to help guide its composition. (Those
pictures recently led to the Chouinard Foundation's rediscovery of
"Street Meeting," a vision of black and white workers joining forces,
which had long been presumed destroyed but in fact was buried under
layers of paint and plaster in what is now a Korean church.)

Beginning
in the 1930's, Siqueiros saved many of the photographs that he gathered
and commissioned from friends, professionals, newspapers and news
agencies. There were photographs of the murals and photographs that fed
the murals, ranging from staged shots of models to documentary
photographs showing class and race struggles like labor union protests
in Mexico City and the Watts riots in Los Angeles. Other pictures -
animals, landscapes and buildings - seem more neutral.

When
Siqueiros died in 1974, there were more than 11,000 images. He
specified in his will that his archive, housed at the Sala de Arte
Público Siqueiros in Mexico City, be made available free for public
use, something like a Communist version of Corbis or Getty Images.

About half the archive can now also be viewed at the Web site e-flux.com,
an arts portal based in New York. Its director, Anton Vidokle, the
other curator of the Redcat show, says he thought of putting the
archive online when he visited it three years ago. "I was blown away by
the material," he said. "I haven't seen a group of pictures this
ideological since my childhood in Moscow. Even a humble image like a
drill bit is celebrated - it's seen as beautiful, glamorous, a tool for
revolution."

About two years ago, Mr. Vidokle and Ms.
Firstenberg began drawing up a list of international artists to
approach for the show. Many were Mexican or Chicano. "It was important to work with artists
who have a connection to Siqueiros," Mr. Vidokle said. "But it's not
like I went into their studios and asked to check their passports."

And, as it happened, they did not so much choose the artists as the
artists chose them. To line up the 17 artists in the show, more than
half of Mexican descent, the curators approached a few dozen. The Los
Angeles conceptual artist John Baldessari and the Cuban installation
artist Carlos Garaicoa were among those who proved unavailable. "It's a
sign of how busy our leading international artists are these days," Ms.
Firstenberg said. "But it's also a sign, I think, of how contested
Siqueiros's legacy is."

Even some artists who chose to participate expressed ambivalence. Many
say they are attracted by Siqueiros's political engagement, but
repelled by his particular brand of politics and his link to a failed
assassination attempt on Trotsky. As the Los Angeles-based artist Rubén
Ortiz Torres put it: "He's a very dogmatic character, a Stalinist who
believed that power should be centralized. But my relationship to
Siqueiros is like my relationship to my father, or to Mexico in
general. It's not a choice between rejecting them or following them
mindlessly." [read on...]

An Image Bank for Everyday Revolutionary Life is a multi-phase project
that begins as an online photographic archive, making available to the
public over ten thousand 20th century images for the first time. The
source for this material is the collection of Mexican muralist David
Alfaro Siqueiros, who compiled the photographs over the course of his
own extraordinary life. This archive can now be viewed at http://www.e-flux.com/siqueiros

As Siqueiros wrote, "Nothing can give the [artist] of today the
essential feeling of the modern era's dynamic and subversive elements
more than the photographic document." The archive -- unique in
structure, content and intention -- was meant for the use of fellow
artists as a means of inspiration and a source of found imagery. The
contents of the archive, images from the 1930s to the early 1970s,
offer cultural and social portraits of different eras and nations. The
collection contains photographic documents that capture a range of
events from political protest to film and theatre performances, from
anti-fascist demonstrations in New York and riots in Los Angeles to
moments in the Russian stage and Mexican cinema. As the title of the
project suggests, the archive offers a politicized vision developed in
the context of revolutionary struggles in Mexico and abroad.

The original archive from which An Image Bank for Everyday
Revolutionary Life is drawn, is housed at Sala de Arte Público
Siqueiros (SAPS) in Mexico City. In the 1960s, while Siqueiros was
engaged in both art and activism, he converted his house in the Polanco
district of the city into a public art space. The house now functions
both as a museum for Siqueiros' work and a contemporary art venue. The
SAPS archive will serve as the point of departure for the second phase
of the project, in which an international group of artists and writers
will be invited to work with the archive's material to extend the
useful life of its photographs.

The traveling exhibition
begins at REDCAT (Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater) in Los Angeles.
As a venue for experimental curatorial practice, REDCAT supports
provocative new projects that showcase the work of artists practicing
around the globe and down the street. In keeping with this engagement
with the life of the city, artists have been invited to make proposals
for new works that will be presented in the gallery as well as public
interventions to be presented billboards across the city. The original
archive project and its reuse by contemporary artists will thus be
integrated with the dynamism of Los Angeles in a fulfillment of
Siqueiros' goal to combine the historical, social and artistic.

An Image Bank for Everyday Revolutionary Life is a collaboration with
Sala de Arte Público Siqueiros and is made possible in part by the
generous support of The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts,
Etant Donnés, the French-American Fund for Contemporary Art, e-flux,
and The Puffin Foundation.

Comments

THE next time you're stuck in traffic in downtown Los Angeles, you
could find yourself in the perfect position to view Ruben Ochoa's
newest work of art. A San Diego native who made his name locally by
turning his family's beat-up van into a mobile art gallery, Mr. Ochoa
has just completed a billboard celebrating the legacy of the Mexican
muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros. It features a photograph of Siqueiros,
who was a Communist Party leader as well as a painter, making a fist,
his face streaked with paint, as two characters in the corner whitewash
his image - a clear allusion to the censorship of Siqueiros's social
realist murals in the past. Across the top runs the phrase "Ain't that
revolutionary?"

Mr. Ochoa's billboard is one of many overtly political pieces
created for "An Image Bank for Everyday Revolutionary Life," a group
show that opens at the Redcat gallery in Los Angeles on Thursday. For
the exhibition, 17 artists were asked to respond to Siqueiros's
photographic archive, some 11,000 pictures that served as source
material for his murals or as documentation of his finished artwork.

[orig. Siqueiros mural]

Most
of the artists lifted images from the archive to make pieces like
photomontages for installation in the gallery. Three artists based in
Los Angeles - Mr. Ochoa, Mark Bradford and Daniel Martinez - also
signed on to make billboards. They are scheduled to be installed
downtown by the end of the week.

Lauri Firstenberg, one of the
show's two curators, says she views the billboards as an essential part
of the show. "Siqueiros was above all a populist artist - making art
for the public and positioning it in the public sphere," she said. "We
always wanted to have a component of the exhibition that was not bound
to the gallery but would interact with L.A.'s urban landscape."

Born in 1896, Siqueiros at one point interacted with the Los Angeles
landscape himself. Driven into exile for political reasons in 1932, he
took a job teaching at the Chouinard School of Art and painted "Street
Meeting," the first of three California murals, on the campus. During
that period he experimented with new materials (automobile paints, for
example, a more durable alternative to traditional fresco materials)
and new equipment (like spray guns, a faster way of applying paint than
brushwork). He also seized on photography as a tool for painting, using
photographs of a work in progress to help guide its composition. (Those
pictures recently led to the Chouinard Foundation's rediscovery of
"Street Meeting," a vision of black and white workers joining forces,
which had long been presumed destroyed but in fact was buried under
layers of paint and plaster in what is now a Korean church.)

Beginning
in the 1930's, Siqueiros saved many of the photographs that he gathered
and commissioned from friends, professionals, newspapers and news
agencies. There were photographs of the murals and photographs that fed
the murals, ranging from staged shots of models to documentary
photographs showing class and race struggles like labor union protests
in Mexico City and the Watts riots in Los Angeles. Other pictures -
animals, landscapes and buildings - seem more neutral.

When
Siqueiros died in 1974, there were more than 11,000 images. He
specified in his will that his archive, housed at the Sala de Arte
Público Siqueiros in Mexico City, be made available free for public
use, something like a Communist version of Corbis or Getty Images.

About half the archive can now also be viewed at the Web site e-flux.com,
an arts portal based in New York. Its director, Anton Vidokle, the
other curator of the Redcat show, says he thought of putting the
archive online when he visited it three years ago. "I was blown away by
the material," he said. "I haven't seen a group of pictures this
ideological since my childhood in Moscow. Even a humble image like a
drill bit is celebrated - it's seen as beautiful, glamorous, a tool for
revolution."

About two years ago, Mr. Vidokle and Ms.
Firstenberg began drawing up a list of international artists to
approach for the show. Many were Mexican or Chicano. "It was important to work with artists
who have a connection to Siqueiros," Mr. Vidokle said. "But it's not
like I went into their studios and asked to check their passports."

And, as it happened, they did not so much choose the artists as the
artists chose them. To line up the 17 artists in the show, more than
half of Mexican descent, the curators approached a few dozen. The Los
Angeles conceptual artist John Baldessari and the Cuban installation
artist Carlos Garaicoa were among those who proved unavailable. "It's a
sign of how busy our leading international artists are these days," Ms.
Firstenberg said. "But it's also a sign, I think, of how contested
Siqueiros's legacy is."

Even some artists who chose to participate expressed ambivalence. Many
say they are attracted by Siqueiros's political engagement, but
repelled by his particular brand of politics and his link to a failed
assassination attempt on Trotsky. As the Los Angeles-based artist Rubén
Ortiz Torres put it: "He's a very dogmatic character, a Stalinist who
believed that power should be centralized. But my relationship to
Siqueiros is like my relationship to my father, or to Mexico in
general. It's not a choice between rejecting them or following them
mindlessly." [read on...]

An Image Bank for Everyday Revolutionary Life is a multi-phase project
that begins as an online photographic archive, making available to the
public over ten thousand 20th century images for the first time. The
source for this material is the collection of Mexican muralist David
Alfaro Siqueiros, who compiled the photographs over the course of his
own extraordinary life. This archive can now be viewed at http://www.e-flux.com/siqueiros

As Siqueiros wrote, "Nothing can give the [artist] of today the
essential feeling of the modern era's dynamic and subversive elements
more than the photographic document." The archive -- unique in
structure, content and intention -- was meant for the use of fellow
artists as a means of inspiration and a source of found imagery. The
contents of the archive, images from the 1930s to the early 1970s,
offer cultural and social portraits of different eras and nations. The
collection contains photographic documents that capture a range of
events from political protest to film and theatre performances, from
anti-fascist demonstrations in New York and riots in Los Angeles to
moments in the Russian stage and Mexican cinema. As the title of the
project suggests, the archive offers a politicized vision developed in
the context of revolutionary struggles in Mexico and abroad.

The original archive from which An Image Bank for Everyday
Revolutionary Life is drawn, is housed at Sala de Arte Público
Siqueiros (SAPS) in Mexico City. In the 1960s, while Siqueiros was
engaged in both art and activism, he converted his house in the Polanco
district of the city into a public art space. The house now functions
both as a museum for Siqueiros' work and a contemporary art venue. The
SAPS archive will serve as the point of departure for the second phase
of the project, in which an international group of artists and writers
will be invited to work with the archive's material to extend the
useful life of its photographs.

The traveling exhibition
begins at REDCAT (Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater) in Los Angeles.
As a venue for experimental curatorial practice, REDCAT supports
provocative new projects that showcase the work of artists practicing
around the globe and down the street. In keeping with this engagement
with the life of the city, artists have been invited to make proposals
for new works that will be presented in the gallery as well as public
interventions to be presented billboards across the city. The original
archive project and its reuse by contemporary artists will thus be
integrated with the dynamism of Los Angeles in a fulfillment of
Siqueiros' goal to combine the historical, social and artistic.

An Image Bank for Everyday Revolutionary Life is a collaboration with
Sala de Arte Público Siqueiros and is made possible in part by the
generous support of The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts,
Etant Donnés, the French-American Fund for Contemporary Art, e-flux,
and The Puffin Foundation.